E-mail as Social Network: the Pitfalls - Social Networking, the Last Generation?
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But perhaps the biggest challenge Yahoo and Google face with this social networking e-mail initiative is whether it's even relevant to most web surfers. Certainly those in their teens and twenties hardly use e-mail anymore. They communicate via IM or use the messaging tools available from the social networks to which they belong. It seems like the only time they use e-mail is when they communicate with the older generation. It is somewhat reminiscent of previous generations who talked with their peers on the phone, but still had to send written thank-you notes to their grandparents.
Joshua Porter observed the phenomenon nearly a year and a half ago in his blog, Bokardo.com. "I recently talked with a father of a MySpace user who said that he tried to email his daughter using regular email and she never responded. He asked her why and she said, 'I use MySpace for email. Send me mail there.' So he created an account and now he messages her there. Wow."
That was then. What about now? Hitwise just reported that, for the United Kingdom, social networks beat out web mail web sites for Internet visits. This is the first time that's happened. Hitwise noticed the same pattern mentioned earlier - younger people prefer to visit social networks to do their socializing, while older people prefer e-mail.
So what does that mean for Yahoo and Google? That depends on what their goals are when it comes to incorporating social networking features into their e-mail and other web services. If they're hoping to catch my generation and the ones before, they're going to have to be genuinely useful; there are a lot of options out there, and not a lot of time to spend on digital communication, so they'd better make life easier for those of us feeling overwhelmed with "social networking fatigue." If they're hoping to capture the next generation, however, they may already have lost the battle.
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